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Age Of Sigmar App Coming Soon & Future Plans
July 7, 2015 by brennon
Games Workshop have given us a hint of things to come with an email last night that confirmed there is an Age of Sigmar App on the way (free to download) which contains the Warscrolls, Rules and a way of bringing that all together to make an army for the tabletop...
The App is currently 'Coming Very Soon' so hopefully that's not too far off. However it does raise some questions about how it's all going to factor into the news we heard from Dakka as well. @redben over on the forums pasted in the details for us and we'll summarise below...
- Age of Sigmar/Games Workshop will be attending all major shows (including Gen Con)
- They want to talk with the community about the game
- This IS the new Warhammer. There is no 9th Edition
- The silly rules from the current Warscrolls are their way of allowing people to say a fond farewell to their armies and continue using them
- Armies of the past will be replaced. The example used was Orcs and the new Ooruks. Ooruks will look different to regular Orcs and therefore in the future the old models will be phased out
- There will NEVER be points values
- Age of Sigmar will support all modes of play...
- Narrative Campaigns will give you the forces to use in each game
- Tournament play will be considered with a way of balancing force
- The Rules will always be free...
- Books will be released but they will just contain additional fluff/background
- They are intending the game to be played with a handful of models straight out of the box (think Lord of the Rings/The Hobbit)
- Totally open to rules revisions as the game grows (think Living Rule Books from Bloodbowl etc)
Well, that sounds very positive. This is all hearsay however so take it with a pinch of salt. If it is true though then I think this shines a brighter light on the game as a whole.
Here's hoping the next White Dwarf and this App give us more clues.
What do you think?
"The App is currently 'Coming Very Soon' so hopefully that's not too far off..."
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I absolutely cannot wait for more news. My friends and I are so excited. I’ll be running to the game store on Saturday to pick up my pre-ordered base set.
“there will never be points values” “tournament play will be considered with a way of balancing force”
So they’ve thrown out the simplest way to balance forces before they even decide if they’ll balance forces. This should be entertaining…
The more I read, the more I see getting rid of points is a solution looking very hard for a problem to attach itself too.
I’m assuming this App is gonna iOS only, again. As of writing Apple are sitting under 20% of smartphone market share. Android or don’t bother.
Their news app is available on Android, I’d be very surprised if they kept it to just iOS.
It is iOS and Android both as @divineauthority says – and free.
It’s a solution for “GW can’t balance the game so it’s pushing that responsibility onto gamers”.
As you might guess: not keen
I’d be surprised if the army builder part of the app gave a mechanism for balancing armies you couldn’t get elsewhere. It could be that rules of balanced games are released on the website at the same time, but for the time being at least I suspect it’s more likely the app will just let you collect together the warscrolls you’re using and note how many are in each unit.
Narrative campaigns giving you the forces to use. Great if you like that kind of thing. A way of balancing for tournament play. Great if you like that kind of thing.
Surely what most people want is something in between? A structured way of building armies themselves that they know will be fair/fun to play against when they take them down to their club or shop?
I imagine you can take those balancing mechanics from the tournament play tweaks and apply it to what you do with your friends down the local club. Just use the unit building rules etc and ignore anything that is very specifically for tournaments.
BoW Ben
IF they actually do any tournament work they did only say consider
How exactly, are they planning to “talk with the community”?
They’ve done everything that is possible to make themselves the social media shut-in of wargaming. As we all know, the store FB pages and stuff are never allowed to “discuss” anything…
I agree with dogma.
But it kinda makes me hopeful..
They clearly want to get rid off the competitive scene and make narrative campaigns and events for them. I hope someone from GW, and you know who i’m talking about, will come back to BoW for a interview, batrep or something. If they really want to get in touch with the comunity and not just our pockets them they should do that.
At least they were very clear what their objectives are. The only thing that is 85% true is… the AoS boxset Warscrolls are not free yet, we already read most of them… but they didn’t release the pdf yet… and i think if they want to get into this they should give us all the tools to be able to test it before buying in it. The app will surely have all the warscrolls and the fact that is both for android and iOS is great ( fuck you windows phone 😛 ).
Anyway, i hope it works out, if it does it might change how things work on 40k too.
More and more intrigued with the direction of travel, ~I’ve always be more a narrative/fluff player rather then beard army builder. Only time will tell whether this work for them commercially. I think they still have several major hurdles to overcome absence from social media wasn’t a good move what they needed was a real strategy to grow a positive community. I’m hoping the haters droning on about price will shut up now as with fewer miniatures required they have reduced the initial buy in price and now compare very favourably to the competition. £75 for starter set still seems a lot but I’m a old gamer! Not rushing out to buy as you really can afford to wait as its going to be available for a while!
Employee I talked to in GW earlier today (nice guy) had an interesting answer to my question about how we are supposed to know what to bring to a friendly game.
He said when you play 40K at a thousand points, you can take a couple of tactical squads, a couple of tanks, an assault squad. Your opponent brings a bunch of Knights. Is that balanced?
I was like, you’ve got me there.
Maybe GWs attempts to balance games are so easy to break anyway, they may as well not bother.
If people want to be tools, they can turn up with ten dragons to play your fifty or so dwarves, and win by turn two, or they can not be tools, and bring a reasonable balance of characters, monsters, elites and line infantry, and you can have a fun game.
It’s just with the former, everyone will know they’re cheating, because they can’t justify the filth they bring on the basis of it costing the same amount of points as your uncompetitive army.
I’m playing devils advocate here to some extent, but it kind of makes sense, maybe…
That only highlights they can’t balance a game with points, other balance requires better design.
The Imperial Knights are sort of the exception that proves the rule, in 40k. He was giving you one of the most extreme example possible, and I’m not sure he’s strengthening his position much by trying to poke holes in their other system to make this one seem less incomplete.
My brother and I are both game to give this system a go, but how do we even begin? We talked for 30 minutes about what we would bring to the table, and while in some ways it was nice to not have to sit down and write out a list, in the end we just agreed that it’s pointless to even try. So we agreed to just bring whatever we could carry on a placemat and cross our fingers.
I am not interested in developing a points system for a game when it should be built into the rules for me. Just like I don’t expect to be forced to come up with all of my own monsters and spells when I purchase an RPG.
These can certainly be expanded upon or added to as a bonus to my experience, but should not be a necessity. I fail to see this as being any more ‘accessible’ than a game with balanced guidelines.
I am a huge proponent of narrative gaming, but without any kind of structure, how am I supposed to know that what we are bringing to the table will fit the narrative at all?
Say I want to bring a host of elves overwhelmed by orcs; I will tell the tale of their valiant stand against hopeless odds.
How many elves do I bring to orcs to even make this work? Do I bring three times as many orcs? Two? What if it’s a completely one-sided stomp? Am I meant to play-test this scenario beforehand to get the right balance?
Unfortunately, it’s rare enough to get a game in as it is, let alone needing to schedule pre-production before we can even start rolling dice.
I cling to a stubborn fool’s hope that there is greatness to come. I can see the opportunity for cool models, maybe even some cool rules, in the future. I know that it is unlikely, but I find it so difficult to just walk away from “Warhammer” after so much time, blood and tears.
I just don’t understand why they removed any kind of points or balancing feature though. Narrative gamers can play 100% narrative games without having to use points, sure… but anyone looking for a structure (which I am warranting would be a HUGE percentage of the player base) can NOT play this game without rules…
Why do you exclude an entire portion of your base on purpose? It’s like not offering meat at your restaurant because vegetarians exist. Could they not visit and just purchase something else? Now anyone who wants meat can’t get it. I can’t see any reasoning behind any of this, personally.
Would Magic have a big player base if the official rules had no card limits and no mana? Would it be fair to ask players to discuss whether it’s ‘reasonable’ for me to cast my 8 drop on Turn 1?
I am trying so hard to be optimistic but if I present the rules as written my gaming group will laugh me out of the room; and how can I even organize a ‘demo game’ for them to try when I don’t have a clue whether the game will even function? Nobody will play a second time if the first game ends up being an unbalanced clown-stomp.
Not to mention some of those rules, like getting re-rolls with my goblin if I wear a hood and win a staring contest, make me feel almost like GW is insulting me for ever finding their game world mature and immersive…
“I’m not sure he’s strengthening his position much by trying to poke holes in their other system to make this one seem less incomplete”
I found the implications of what he was saying pretty funny. “You want us to balance Age of Sigmar? Look how bad we are at it in 40K!” lol
No kidding, eh?
And Imperial Knights at least cost almost 400 points! I can only imagine what they’d be like in a Warscroll that contained “1 or more Imperial Knights”…
This may fix some of the internet rage, but won’t fix the fact its a fun but ultimately weak and depthless ruleset.
Still the balance mechanism if it works may preserve a tournament scene that may help the game deliver financially as GW require.
May sound suprising but I hope it works as I think GW with just 40k would be in trouble and ripples of that would effect the wider industry
It gives me hope they’re actually sending out reps. I really want to love Age of Sigmar. “Armies of the past will be replaced. The example used was Orcs and the new Ooruks. Ooruks will look different to regular Orcs and therefore in the future the old models will be phased out.” I’m very happy they just came out and said this. I don’t want to spend $200 on models that will be phased out in a few months.
It might not be a few months though. It could be a couple of years before we see any Orruk models, or at least sufficient of them to be able to phase out Orc models. Presumably the release schedule will introduce the likes of the Orrks, Duardin, Aelfs, and so on over a period of time, rather than all in one go.
*Orruks
Orruks?…surely its not that bad?
At least they’re not sweaty Orruks….
It wouldn’t surprise me if there was a mad 3 to 6 month blitz on AoS similar to what we’ve seen recently with 40k, we know they’ve got the production capability to do it. I’d imagine they’d hit all the major races first.
Pure speculation though.
sweaty Orruks named Betty?
I’ve been totally amazed at the negative backlash about the lack of points in AoS.
I can’t believe that so many people seem to be incapable of having fun without Games Workshop telling them how to do it. You all know there’s more to wargamming than taking two supposedly even forces, marching to the center, and killing each other to the last model?
I’ve never gotten into GW’s stuff due to the “gotcha” style of their rules. Deathstars, synergies, etc. It gives me a headache. AoS is the first time I’m actually contemplating jumping in, and that’s a terrible crime considering the quality of stuff GW produces.
AoS seems to be an attempt to bring Fantasy to a style that I’m more accustomed to. We play historical wargames and have had hundreds of hours of fun without a point system in sight.
We set up seemingly reasonable match ups. We keep some reinforcements on hand in case something unexpectedly catastrophic happens to one side or the other to keep the game rolling. Worst case, we adjust a broken scenario, switch sides, and give it another go. Most of all, we place enjoying each others company above having to win at whatever cost. No cheese allowed, thank you.
It make me giggle when I keep reading about how bad AoS sucks because the rules don’t cover what if so and so brings such and such model to the table and always wins? Here’s a hint. The answer isn’t IN the rules. You’ll figure it out when your finely crafted Cheesball MegaDeathstarThingie Army is gathering dust because no one wants you at their table…..
Guys, get your heads out of the books, take a deep breath, and realize a game is a reason to enjoy some laughs with your friends. It’s going to be OK.
“You all know there’s more to wargamming than taking two supposedly even forces, marching to the center, and killing each other to the last model?”
That’s exactly what happens in AoS. As things stand there’s nothing else to it.
Yes @redben as things stand in this four page set of free rules that’s less than a week old and the starter set isn’t even on sale yet, there’s nothing else to do 😉
The rules will still be the same on Saturday when the set is released, and unless vogless has special insider knowledge as to what’s coming, he’s talking about the game with those four pages of rules. Those four pages of rules make for games in which two supposedly balanced forces meet in the middle of the table and start killing each other to the last model. Because we all know that wargaming is about more than that, the rules are unsatisfactory (and for other reasons too). We can judge the rules on their future incarnations once we have them.
Yes, of course wargaming is about much more than that @redben but all there is to do in any wargame is kill each other until you add in scenarios and objectives. That’s the bit we haven’t seen yet. The starter set comes with scenarios and there are rumours of a book coming very soon with more. All we have at the moment is the core mechanics on how to move and kill each other so of course that’s all there is to do … at the moment.
You’re taking my comments out of context. They were a reply to the claim that with the current AoS rules, GW were liberating us from games that were just about putting two supposedly balanced forces onto the table and having them march towards each other and kill each other. That were freeing us from this style of gaming. They not only don’t do that (and nor did we need to be liberated as we can and do game any way we want already), they do the opposite. The AoS rules are only about ploughing into a schmozz in the middle of the field and killing each other. Whether that changes in future is not the point at hand.
What I don’t understand is how a points system in any way prevents you from playing things the way you want to play.
If all of a sudden a Greek Hoplite was worth 18 points, and a Persian Spearman 6, would that stop you, in any way, shape or form, from continuing on as you are?
I’m not asking GW to show me how to have fun. I am asking to know roughly how many rat-men my mates can bring for every troll that I lay down, so that we both have a reasonable chance at winning, and that we can spend the rare hobby time we have playing games and having fun, not coming to a consensus on how we should balance the scenario.
I am asking them to tell me that because they produce this product. It is their job. I am paying them a lot of cash to get these models, and while I enjoy the investment required to build, paint and collect them all, balancing the armies is not something I feel should be my responsibility.
Not all of my friends want to play historical games or narrative campaigns. Sometimes they want to build a list beforehand, get excited for Saturday night or whenever, and then come throw down. Not all of them are into it for the fluff, or for the re-enactment, or whatever else.
The issue is that this kind of open-ended design caters just fine to you, but it leaves me completely neglected. If it was a matter of mutual exclusivity, I could understand. But it’s not. What I am asking for does not affect you in the least, so I don’t get why some people in the community are trying to defend the game in a way that makes me feel like I am the bad guy for enjoying the gaming side of things. Why do you want to guilt me away from trying this game when the goal should be for all of us to play it together?
AoS will never/ isn’t meant to be a replacement to 8th. 8th still works, so does KoW and hopefully Warlord does a fantasy version of Hail Ceasar. I’d LOVE to see the Old Guard come together under a fantasy HC with old style minis and the like. I’d be all over it.
I’m not trying to sway/guilt anyone to do anything. I just want to speak up because we’re at opposite ends and I want to let the tourney folks know you CAN have fun without points. You guys know who should win a given fight just by looking at it, no math required. That’s really all it takes to build balanced scenarios. Bring what you want, we’ll make it work. Within reason of course.
Believe it or not, I DO understand the points thing. It’s not my thing, but to each his own. It reminds me of the old Marvel Superheroes RPG WAY BACK. Pretty funny moment when we all realized we all built heroes so powerful, nobody could hurt each other… I just can’t see going after AoS on that fact alone.
I’m also not here to promoted AoS as some awesome infallible ruleset. It’s not. It’s a starter set that hasn’t been around a week. Someone on the forums called it the D&D Red Box for Warhammer. I totally agree. Functional, and simple. Get the new blood in and then pile on the goodness. There’s enough there to get me going, and to give me some inspiration to make it my own. I really hoping the rumors of a big rulebook are true and that it brings everyone back to the table somehow. I also want more from the game. I’d love to see mass battle rules, siege rules, dungeon crawls, advanced combat rules, etc….
I’m happy they put the scrolls out for the old stuff, but it’s clear the future of the game lies with new stuff, not old. Not much is known about the new stuff yet. Having been involved with fantasy gaming of one sort or another for 30+ years, I’m excited to see what they come up with. They have the cash, talent, and set up to bring out stuff like we’ve never seen before, the question is will they? Time will tell.
If the rumors are true, it SEEMS that GW is trying to get back to the shows, and listen to customers. They really need to come out with a bit more about future plans soon, no doubt.
im excited about the future of the game even though i will use a home made points system. however i do not like the idea of miniatures ready to use straight out of the box as i prefer to build and modify miniatures… but hey maybe that’s just me